Books were once the most cost-effective form of spreading human knowledge and human experience. With the reduced cost of the old clunky printing press into machines which print and bind, that cost-effectiveness has dropped further. You only need to look on "just in time" book publisher cafepress to see how little it costs the content creator to have a book published and distributed. Zero dollars is how much.

But human knowledge is changing. The way we record and distribute our external memory as a society, culture and technological species is morphing into something different. We are moving from human knowledge as consumption; to human knowledge as interaction. The change over will most likely not be absolute, but there is value in both ways.

A Fire Upon The Deep

In 1992 the internet was in its infancy , as was cyberpunk. Vernor Vinge wrote in "A Fire Upon The Deep";

So now there was a tiny settlement, and they called it the High Lab. It was really just human playing with an old library. It should be safe, using their own automation, clean and benign. This library wasn't a living creature, or even possessed of automation (which here might mean something more, far more, human). They would look and pick and choose, and be careful not to be burned .... Human starting fires and playing games.

The archive informed the automation. Data structures were built, recipes followed. a local network was built, faster than anything on Straum, but surely safe. Nodes were added, modified by other recipes. The archive was a friendly place, with hierarchies of translation keys that led them along. Straum itself would be famous for this.

Six months passed. A year.

The omniscient view. Not self-aware really. Self-awareness is much overrated. Most automation works far better as a whole, and even if human-powerful, it does not need to self-know.

But the local net at the High Lab had transcended - almost without the humans realizing. The processes that circulated through its nodes were complex, beyond anything that could live on the computers the humans had brought. Those feeble devices were now simply front ends to the devices the recipes suggested. The processes had the potential for self-awareness ... and occasionally the need.

"We should not be."
"Talking like this?"
"Talking at all."

Central to Vinge's story was the awakening of a great self-aware evil in the library. But our distributed information system doesn't have those centralised storage structures any longer. Once I used to fret enormously over the information on my 256 Kilobyte hard drive. Storage space was incredibly expensive back then. But since then Moore's Law has been followed and I recently bought a 20Gb USB hard drive for $150 USD.

The modern library is distributed across untold servers across the planet, and its index cards are the search engines. The old world library was a consumer only based area. It was geared for consumption, not creation. There are "quiet" reading rooms in libraries. There are listening rooms for audio. There are areas where the written word can be consumed in comfort.

In the decentralised library we use each day, there are no sitting rooms. It is one big interactive loop of human external memory and hence knowledge.

Textbooks and Libraries

The old textbooks we used at University in the 1980s were hugely expensive chunks of pulped wood and tattooed ink. We would cart them on the Sydney trains with us as we went, reading them to the clatter-clatter of the old brick-red rattlers. We went to sit in an auditorium, consuming diligently; even dutifully the words and writings of the lecturer. We would then slink off to the library and sit quietly as we consumed the writings in the text books. Attempting the Physics and Chemistry problems those books posed.

I have some textbooks that are still of value, but more and more they are the "In a Nutshell" Style Guides. Nothing more than handy flick-throughs of APIs, rather than a source of study. They appeal to the applied (interactive) rather than the consumptive.

Other amazing sources of human knowledge are the MySQL and PHP documentation repositories. These documentation sources are interactive, they publish users comments along with them. I have the dead-tree version of the MySQL manual, but I never use it. The MySQL manual online has a search tool and the added value of people's comments . The PHP documentation is even better in this respect . The PHP community has a stronger and more open tradition of user comments on documentation.

Collaborative Media

Wikipedia is another collaborative source. The Wikipedia site is more like the old type library. It aims to be a central resource. How the data is collected an published is different to a traditional library, but the purpose of being a single authoritative source is the same.

The Wikipedia technology is a different matter. Interestingly, a wikipedia was used by TheophileEscargot, Scrymarch and others to create the article; " Politics-Oriented Software Development ". It was later published on developer.com . The article is also incredibly popular with the tech-blogging community .

The collaborative development of an article is not so far different to the processes that are used to develop opensource software. South Sea Republic is also a collaborative meme builder. You only have to look at the effect a single article had . My writing of this article was prompted by another website . The human experience and knowledge are becoming more rapidly incremental, inter-connected and interactively available.

Recording Human Experience

I had two books arrive on my front doorstep today. One a biography on Dan Deniehy and the other Bill Hayden's autobiography. The Deniehy book had formerly been part of the Australian Embassy library in Washington DC. When the cost of construction and distribution of printed material was high, only the celebrities, with great mass appeal, had biographies written of them. it was uneconomical to publish anything else.

Now courtesy of blogs we have multitudes recording their everyday experiences. The American public radio channel often broadcasts the recordings of interviews people have done in a booth at New York's Penn Station. It is an attempt to preserve an audible history. The internet is rapidly over taking that project. Podcasting is to the audible word as a blogging is to the written word.

The World Of Abundance

The whole manner of how we record human experience and human knowledge is changing. Human experience and knowledge have moved from the information scarce form of consumption, to one of abundant interaction. Considering that what we call the internet is quite immature, this process of interaction will only escalate as more bandwidth intense forms of interaction become economically viable for the home and casual user.

Since Quantum Physics laid bare the limitations of reductionism and the clockwork universe, we have known there will be a rationality change in western thought. Nobody is sure what it will be, it will most likely emerge as individuals mutate the culture and society into something that takes complete advantage of the human situation. With the internet as immature as it is - the edge effects can be ridden almost daily. We live in exciting times.

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